DataShade
DataShade
DataShade

"Most RPGs are white as hell. They can't dance, they have no natural rhythm and they most certainly can't jump."

To be fair, 1st and 2nd Edition art wasn't "racially inadequate," it was just plain "inadequate." Cariactures, fan-made character sketches, and fan services; the 2nd Ed books had some full-page, high-quality prints, but those were reproductions of cover art for novels.

@Futhark "Do Drow count?"

I don't own 4th Ed, but Knode refers specifically to 3rd Ed's "example" characters in the early chapters. Those 11 examples only show one (I'm pretty sure the bard is a half-elf, but if I'm wrong, two) pureblood white human.

Three OUT OF FIVE illustrations of named humans in the opening chapters were minorities.

No. Please don't go there.

Maztica is the Forgotten Realms analogue to South America; Zakhara was Forgotten Realms' Arabian-Nights themed continent IIRC, and Kara-Tur was its Far East.

Knode's dismissal of 3rd Edition bothered me. There are like 11 "example" characters in the first few chapters (including the monk he claims doesn't appear again, which may be true insofar as she isn't drawn again, which is true of most of the example characters; they're referred to by name in 'word problems'

I'm going to hold fast here; something that requires an accident of birth, genetic lottery, or divine favor in order to even qualify can't be called a "job."

"it's chock-full of fabulous fighting females that won't find their way into a nude "Girls of Gaming" style pictorial any time soon."

Not always. Depending on the era, Dropships in the Battletech universe are sacrosanct

@NeonAnderson You ... want a job because you want to force people to respect you? Or murder them for irritating you? The next time there's one of those "video games makes children violent" debates, do the rest of us a favor and hide, please.

@Kieran 'Casper' Quinn You ... would take a mystical connection to the very life of the universe, something that, with proper training, would allow you to see the future, run faster than a car, heal wounds, project your thoughts into near-tangible images ... and you'd use it to steal a car? I don't think even the

@NeonAnderson Only "Jedi" and "Sith" aren't precisely jobs - they require an inborn connection to the force. Like ... anybody with sufficient training and dedication can become almost any profession, but people without a force connection in SW universe can't become force-users.

I always saw the "no kids, no (ST)diseases" as being a sort of ... Mary Sue ... kind of thing.

Did you play Recettear?

They were space Bounty Hunters, not really Space Detectives. I didn't play the CB games; is Jet still on the force for those?

Which is to say, while I don't personally aggregate comment data on Kotaku; how do the number of replies vs. total number of comments on this article line up against others? I'm betting there are a lot fewer replies here than normal....

You dream about being a pilot, but you can't even remember "that one girl" has a name? Faridah Malik.